Kaepernick Worship Hopes To Return The Obama Grievance Culture To Power
Unemployed quarterback Colin Kaepernick has been named GQ magazine's Citizen of the Year. How you receive this news will probably depend on whether you see him as a black martyr or an impressionable guy in the thrall of the grievance industry.
Kaepernick, who has been unable to find employment this season in the NFL despite a dire need for experienced QBs, said he agreed to collaborate with GQ on this project in an effort to "reclaim the narrative of his protest" back to the movement towards racial justice and equality. This after president Donald Trump turned the kneeling protests during the Star Spangled Banner into a protest against the flag, not black grievances about police and society.
Rappers J. Cole and Common, 90-year-old singer and activist Harry Belafonte and NBA star Kevin Durant compare him to Muhammad Ali in his sacrifice of his career and the million dollars he donated to black charities.
Meanwhile, Kaepernick critics point out that he wore socks depicting cops as pigs and that his statistics about police targeting of blacks are seriously flawed. Indeed, Kaepernick and his followers have focussed on the unarmed black men (16 from a population of 21 million in 2015) shot by cops while ignoring the tens of thousands of black families who are protected by cops from predatory blacks in their neighbourhoods.
So far, Kaepernick (who was adopted by white parents) hasn’t pronounced reconciliation between black and whites as hopeless. By contrast, New York Times editorialist Ekow N. Yankah wrote this past weekend that he sees no hope. Even for the perpetually aggrieved Times, Yankah’s broadside about the Donald Trump effect is sulphurous. Here’s how he says he will advise his children.
“I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust. Much sooner than I thought I would, I will have to discuss with my boys whether they can truly be friends with white people.” Yankah then goes on to list the Al Sharpton List of Perpetual Black Grievances. From how black drug addiction is treated differently (disproven many times) to minority unemployment to the president, he laments a nation unable to share.
“Even the nerve of some rich or visible African-Americans to protest that America, in its laws and in its police, has rarely been just to all has been met with the howls of a president who cannot tolerate that the lucky and the uppity do not stay in their place.” Uppity is code for Martin Luther King, whose colour-free philosophy is dispatched by Yankah.
In the view of Yankah, Kaepernick and the Obama Chorus of guilty white liberals, blacks have no chance, are perpetually discriminated against and need to hive themselves off from society. They cite the tiny Nazi movement in the U.S. to justify their own contention they never get a break from a racist white nation.
If this weren’t so tragic it might be laughable. As Tucker Carlson pointed out to Yankah, his sons are in far more danger from fellow backs than white cops. Unfair? Ask any Asian American student trying to get into a university of college in North America if the field is tilted away from blacks? Or any white male competing for a job in corporate America today if he has a real shot at a position?
Contrary to Yankah’s perssimism, this is a great time to be black— especially black and female. As anyone familiar with the situation knows, higher education is begging for black candidates in their science, commerce and mathematics departments. So much so that they’ve bent admission requirements to find the people Kaepernick/Yankah say are ignored.
Both Barack and Michelle Obama profited from quotas at college and work. It’s not rejection but an absence of sufficient candidates that faces these institutions. The problem is that the schools can’t find enough of the next great scientists or business leaders.
It’s the same in business. Corporations are begging for black candidates to fill executive jobs and board positions to diversify their profile. Again, supply and not repression are the problem. With so much policy skewed in their direction this is a great period for black opportunity— as Barack Obama exhibited when elected president of the U.S.
Indeed, the image of uber-rich blacks complaining about repression is precious. If LeBron James making $25 million a year or Jay-Z and Beyoncé pulling in $100 million a year is subjugation then most whites would be signing up tomorrow.
Black leaders will say, sure, maybe they’re not producing enough people the economy is demanding. But that's because of oppression in the educations system and in murder-filled communities. Ironically, those conditions are the ones created by their allies, the white liberals, whose Great Society has institutionalized the cycle of poverty and welfare dependence on those poor urban communities.
Ironically, those conditions are the ones created by their allies, the white liberals, whose Great Society has institutionalized the cycle of poverty and welfare dependence on those poor urban communities. With the assistance of a complicit media, the Kaepernick crowd have conflated a 70 percent unwed black mother disaster into a failure of whites. Black leaders and white liberals give this all the yadda-yadda.
The reality here is not racial inequality. Kaepernick’s GQ veneration is a progressive liberal community that was accorded special status in the Obama era demanding to turn back the clock. And they don’t like relinquishing the heady whiff of power they wielded. Not one bit.
Most of all, they don’t like being told they are just normal folks again.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy.is the host of the podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin on anticanetwork.com. He’s also a regular contributor three-times-a-week to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of seven books. His website is Not The Public Broadcaster